A Texas man who killed a man and kidnapped his wife during a December 1985 robbery was executed by lethal injection early Thursday as his mother and sister watched.
Freddie Lee Webb, 33, was pronounced dead about 12 minutes after state officials began the flow of lethal drugs into tubes attached to his arms at a state prison in Huntsville, about 80 miles north of Houston.Another execution is scheduled for early Monday, a few minutes after the end of the Easter holiday, for a death row inmate who has volunteered to be executed after he was convicted in the 1986 murder of a Houston restaurant owner.
Richard Lee Beavers is scheduled to die before dawn Monday by lethal injection after the U.S. Supreme Court halted an earlier scheduled execution in September 1993 after he volunteered to die but changed his mind.
As Webb's mother and sister stood in the death chamber to witness the execution, tears streamed down his cheeks. He smiled and nodded at his relatives but said nothing.
"I love you," Betty Whiteside, said to her son as he lay strapped to the execution table.
Webb coughed twice as the lethal dose of chemicals entered his body.